Toronto's FAMOUS UNDERGROUND, formerly known as REVOLVER, are offering a bus package for the fans to catch their December 18th show in Milton, Ontario at The Hardball Cafe. Details can be found on the official event page set up on Facebook.

The Hardball Cafe is located at 8750 Hwy 25 North, Milton, ON. Doors open at 9:00pm

Following is an excerpt from recent interview with Famous Underground frontman Nick Walsh and bassist Laurie Green conducted by BW&BK; scribe Carl Begai:

Revolver Roulette

For close to a decade vocalist Nick Walsh and bassist Laurie-Ann Green have stared down the music industry. Ten years of going against the requirements of trend and sell-your-soul million-seller success. The pair have fought tooth and nail to shove Revolver into the international spotlight, earning both a loyal fanbase and a collection of fence-sitters wondering why in the hell Walsh doesn’t reform Slik Toxik, or at least go back writing ‘Big Fucking Deal’ anthems. The latter is a call that continues to fall on deaf ears, as the band opts instead to continue in a darker if-Metallica-were-Guns-N-Roses direction with a brand new album. Unfortunately, as the band was gearing up to shop the record word came down that a European pop band using the Revolver name had been signed in North America. Confusion reigned as several international press and media agencies contacted Walsh and Green about their new found success, and the decision was made to drop Revolver in favour of a less accessible moniker

Thus a new chapter begins as Famous Underground.

“It’s actually gone over really well,” Walsh says of the name change. “We’ve gotten lots of good feedback, and Laurie and I were actually laughing about it because people are saying ‘Congratulations on the new name…’ and we’re like, ‘Did we win the lottery or something? Did they all know something for years that we didn’t?’ (laughs).”

The change could have, and some “experts” will say should have, happened a lot earlier. The high profile rise of Velvet Revolver in 2002 featuring Guns N’ Roses alumni Slash, Duff McKagan, Matt Sorum, and Stone Temple Pilot Scott Weiland didn’t do Revolver any favours. Walsh, however, doesn’t believe there was any gravity to that situation.

“We didn’t really see any need to change it before. We were called Revolver and there was nothing else in out genre with that name. When Velvet Revolver came out some people would make remarks about that but it wasn’t a big deal for us. But, when a band with the exact same name gets signed to a major international deal… it’s like a race to the finish line. Someone is going to get there first and then everybody else has to shed that skin and move on.”
“It’s not as bad as it could have been if we had decided to release this new record under the Revolver name. The timing of everything is unbelievable; it came at the right time. It’s not that bad for us. We have albums out and people recognize us because of the music, so I don’t think those fans are going to have a hard time accepting the name change. We’ll still be known as Revolver to them for a while, so it’ll be a slow shift, but there are a lot of people that have never heard of us before anyway. With this new album we’re going to reach a bunch of new people.”
“A good band name comes naturally,” he adds. “The name Famous Underground came together in a regular conversation, just putting two words together and going ‘Eureka! It fits!’”

There’s an ugly financial reality that comes along with being an established band forced to change its call sign. Boxes of merchandise, for example, sporting the old name of a band not popular enough to sell them off as limited edition collector’s items. According to Walsh they’ve managed to avoid this particular nightmare.

“We’ve made a point over the last few years that, unless we’re on the road, why get merchandise made up? We’re dealing strictly on a digital download basis right now, so we’re not paying for a pressing of the records, and the merch that we have had available has been a case of us having to manufacture it as it’s ordered rather than printing up a thousand shirts or whatever. We didn’t do what some people you and I know did, where they printed up a whackload of T-shirts that are now sitting in a garage because their bands broke up.”

Oddly enough, Walsh and Green encountered a similar problem with regards to public perception long before they began shopping the new album as Revolver. In March 2008 they released The New Blood Rock Show, a live DVD featuring a band documentary and interviews showcasing the line-up. With the exception of Walsh and Green all of those players have since been replaced, making The New Blood Rock Show seem like a wasted effort. Walsh disagrees.

“We video all our shows and we did a gig here in Toronto that made me and Laurie decide that we needed a really good live video for promo material. The idea for The New Blood Rock Show started like that, and when we presented the idea to someone we know here in Canada with an independent label, it just turned into what it was. As we were in the editing stages for the video there was some political crap going on with the existing band members at that tine. Laurie and I had to make a decision: do we want to see things through or do we scrap the idea altogether? We’d put so much time and effort into it, and for us being the mainstays of what is now Famous Underground, it wasn’t about those other guys.”
“That’s not an ego thing,” he adds. “For us it’s about the songs, the show, and all the stuff we worked on that our following is into. Why deprive the people who were there of the show? Plus we had distribution that gave us a platform to branch out and move on with the new studio record. Some of the songs on The New Blood Rock Show, we were just honing them for this record.”

Click here for the complete interview. For information on Famous Underground go to this location.